wtorek, 31 lipca 2012

Invocation of web services as part of business process is common and most likely because of that default implementation of Service Task in BPMN2 specification is web service. Recently (5.4) jBPM5 has gotten support for such activity.

jBPM5 web service support is based on Apache CXF dynamic client. It provides dedicated Service Task handler (that implements WorkItemHandler interface).

org.jbpm.process.workitem.bpmn2.ServiceTaskHandler

Worth noting is that this handler is capable of invoking both web service end points and simple Java based services as with previous ServiceTask handler (org.jbpm.bpmn2.handler.SendTaskHandler) based on the implementation attribute of service task node

This configuration is done on service node level as parameter (data input) so it allows to have different configuration for service nodes and to be handled by the same service task handler.

Let's try to go through this implementation with example. We are going to build a process that will get weather forecast for given zip codes in US. So process will look like this:

This process will:

ask for couple of zip codes on the first human task (task is assigned to john)

next transform result of the user task to a collection that will be used as input for multi instance service task

then based on the input collection process will create several instances of service task to query the weather forecast service

once all service task instances are completed it will log result to the console

and create another human task to show the weather forecast for selected zip codes (task is assigned to john)

When process instance is started it will prompt the user to select in what mode service task instances should be executed: async or sync. With this particular example changing the mode from async to sync will not make big difference as the service we use is rather fast but with services that takes some time to respond difference will be noticeable.

But how does it know it is web service and even more important what web service it is? This is configured as part of process definition using few dedicated constructs:

1. first of all we need to tell the engine where is our WSDL so it can be read and operations from it can be invoked - this is done with BPMN2 import: <import importType="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" location="http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?WSDL" namespace="http://ws.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/"/>

NOTE: Unfortunately tooling does not support this yet so the bpmn2 file needs to be edited by hand. Soon tooling will provide this as well.

Yet another important thing here is that if you plan to use request or response object of the service in your process as variables make sure that all of them implement java.io.Serializable interface so they can be properly persisted. One way to do this (used in the example) is to provide additional configuration to tell JAXB to add Serializable while generating classes from WSDL and generate classes as part of the build:

Complete source code can be found here. It comes with test cases that uses this example as well as local service that can be used to illustrate difference between sync and async modes.

This example can be executed on jbpm-console when build from master, as it already has this service task handler configured. Here is a short guide on how to do it:
1. clone jbpm master and build it with mvn clean install -DskipTests -Dfull (alternatively download latest build from build server)
2. clone jbpm-examples and build jbpm-ws-example project with mvn clean install
3. copy result of build in point 2 (jbpm-ws-sample-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar) into jbpm-installer/dependencies
4. copy WeatherWSServiceProcess.bpmn2 into jbpm-installer/sample/evaluation/src/main/resource
5. copy all archives from jbpm-distribution into jbpm-installer/lib
6. use jbpm-installer to install jbpm into jboss AS7 - ant install.demo.noeclipse
7. start demo server - ant start.demo.noeclipse

then go to jbpm-console and run the process with name WeatherWSServiceProcess.

poniedziałek, 30 lipca 2012

JUDCon 2012 in Boston was a great place to meet with fellow developers and discuss about future of jBPM. I had a pleasure to give a talk about experimental project that I have been working on for quite some time, but unfortunately not enough time was spent on it. Anyway, I gave a introduction to the project that I use to call jbpm enterprise.

The goal of this project is to provide comprehensive BPM platform on top of jBPM and Drools projects to leverage the most of them in the enterprise (Java EE) environment. So what it does?

First of all it bundles jbpm and drools (together with all dependencies) into JBoss Module.

Next it provides very tiny layer that abstracts knowledge api and provides simplified interfaces to interact with execution engine (execution engine is knowledge base with sessions enclosed by an component with additional characteristics - more in presentation)

exposes some services via OSGi service repository

provides maven archetypes to build your components that utilize the platform over OSGi service registry

bundle archetype that is dedicated to put you process/rules/events logic in

web application archetype that makes use of the platform (starts, signal processes, etc)

More details can be found in the presentation from the JUDCon2012 conference.